Family ties

While my great grandfather hid in a rain barrel, a Ukrainian villager raped my great grandmother. Some time later, my grandfather was born.

He looked Ukrainian—so much so that he could slip away to the village, pass as a Christian child, and overhear the neighbors scheduling their next attack on the Jews. Then he would scamper back to the shtetl and let his parents know it was time to hide in the woods again.

A noble history all around.

My father and brother inherited the Ukrainian rapist’s good looks, and I inherited his thirst.

This is a fake subhead

I first learned about the Ukrainian rapist last year, in the context of one of my father’s breakfast table reminiscences. My father mentioned it as if it was one of the old family stories—like the stories about my father’s childhood, or my mother’s father’s death in an airplane crash, or my parents’ marriage. I’ve been hearing those stories since I tasted milk, but the rapist in the family tree was news.

Perhaps because the boy’s face reminded him that he had failed to protect his wife, my great grandfather made a daily exercise of beating my grandfather.

He beat him in Ukraine, he beat him in steerage on the passage to America, he beat him in the new land. He only stopped beating him when my grandfather, with my great grandfather’s written consent, enlisted in the US Army at age fifteen to go fight the Huns.

Did someone here order a list?

Although the WayBack machine did not preserve any of this website’s first year, it did capture quite a lot of our second year, 1996. Behold the splendor of the early web:

Block that quote!

This is a quote from a friend. Some quotes are better than others. We last heard of him in the 1970s when I was in high school. Late one night, the phone rang. I answered. A man claiming to be a New York City policeman told me that he had picked up a deranged homeless man claiming to be my father’s father. Could we come pick him up?

This is yet another thing my friend had to say. When he emerged from the hospitals, the US government gave my grandfather a disability pension, and this time the money went to him.

My grandfather married seven women that we know about, but none of the marriages stuck.

The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC) theory does not mean that people are smart in groups — they’re not. Anyone who’s seen an angry mob knows it. But crowds, presented with the right challenge and the right interface, can be wise. When it works, the crowd is wiser, in fact, than any single participant.

Clients, like other humans, often fear what they don’t understand. Daniel Ritzenthaler explains how sound goal-setting, documentation, and communication strategies can bridge the gap between a designer’s intuition and a client’s need for proof.

If I were a subhead and you were a lady

The US government arranged to have my underage grandfather’s soldier’s pay sent directly to my great grandfather in America.

My grandfather might have thought World War I would be softer than life with Poppa, but if so, he was mistaken. He emerged from trench warfare with a plate in his head, a metal disk in his knee, and certified paranoid schizophrenia as the result of exposure to mustard gas, a chemical agent the civilized nations were using on each other’s soldiers.

When he emerged from the hospitals, the US government gave my grandfather a disability pension, and this time the money went to him. Armed with those small funds, a schizophrenic’s talent for the grift, and his striking handsomeness, he won my grandmother and produced two children, one of whom was my father.

In deference to tradition, my grandfather beat my father every day. He extended the tradition by also beating my grandmother.

That stopped when my father, still wearing his Navy uniform, returned from World War II and threw my grandfather out.

In the decades that followed, my grandfather would sometimes appear out of nowhere, creating emotional havoc until my father gently put him on a train back to New York.

Let there be subheads

My grandfather married seven women that we know about, but none of the marriages stuck.

He gravitated to the Bowery and probably died there.

We last heard of him in the 1970s when I was in high school. Late one night, the phone rang. I answered. A man claiming to be a New York City policeman told me that he had picked up a deranged homeless man claiming to be my father’s father. Could we come pick him up?

We didn’t live in New York; my parents were out of town; as a minor watching my younger brother in my parents’ absence, I couldn’t travel to New York to fetch my grandfather. So I told the policeman that my father’s sister—my grandfather’s daughter—lived in the New York area and gave him her telephone number. Then, very politely, I hung up.

Just thinking, there might be some value in open sourcing this book, and having people update some bits like screenshots, figures, bandwidth numbers, etc… As much as I love the content, it’s very hard to talk to visual people with 10-year old screenshots…